climate change

The high Arctic is—well, it’s cold. It’s the Arctic after all. And we are very far north. Far north of Iceland, way up at 78º N and way north of Norway, in the waters around an astonishing group of rock-and-ice islands known as Svalbard. Greenpeace has invited me to join them for a while on […]

I’m in the high Arctic, far north of Norway at around 78º N latitude in a group of islands known collectively as Svalbard. For a few days I’m a guest on the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise while we do a little investigating into the arrival of fishing ships into these waters as the ocean warms […]

We’re up in the high Arctic, in Svalbard. I’m a guest for a few days on the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise. (It’s a bit of a misnomer at this time of year because the sun never sets, so—to paraphrase Hemingway—the sun also never rises.) As we are slowly leaving Isfjorden (Icy Fjords) 78º N and […]

Co-authored by Sylvia Earle Six years ago we rushed to the Gulf of Mexico after Deepwater Horizon exploded and BP’s well gushed oil for 87 panicked-filled days of oiled beaches, oiled birds, oiled turtles, dead dolphins, and shattered human lives. But memories are short, so we’re drilling for more in harder, riskier places. Last month, […]

The Skeena River snakes out of fir-lined fjords on the misty northern coast of British Columbia, and washes over a thousand-acre sandbar. Flora Bank is a biological bottleneck over which millions of finger-length young salmon enter the sea each spring. Scientist Allen Gottesfeld calls Flora Bank the “Grand Central Station” for the watershed. All streams in the […]

It’s June 2013: A group of park rangers are walking down a peaceful strip of shoreline in Washington State’s famous Olympic National Park when they spot an alarming sight: dozens of shriveled, gooey-looking purple and orange sea stars trying to cling to a rock. There’s something wrong, but the rangers are not quite sure what. […]